It is a rare honour for any writer—­at least for one who is neither poet nor novelist—­to have his productions live beyond two generations, and to continue to be a great literary force, when fifty years have altered all the conditions in which he wrote and the purposes and ideas which he treated.  It cannot be said that Carlyle’s effective influence is less now than it was a generation ago.  It has lived through the Utilitarian and Evolution movements and has not been extinguished by them.  And Thomas Carlyle bids fair to enter into that sacred band whose names outlive their own century and give some special tone to their national literature.

The survival of certain books and names from generation to generation does not depend on merit alone.  Boswell’s Life of Johnson is immortal:  though we do not rank “Bozzy” as a hero or a genius.  Hume’s History of England is a classic:  though it can hardly be said to be an adequate account of our country.  Few books have ever exercised so amazing an influence as Rousseau’s Social Contract; yet the loosest mind of to-day can perceive its sophistry.  Burke’s diatribes on the French Revolution affected the history of Europe; though no one denies that they were inspired by passion and deformed by panic.  Hobbes has very few readers to-day; but the Leviathan may last as long as More’s Utopia, which has hardly more readers in our age.  Books which exert a paramount influence over their contemporaries may die down and be known only in the history of literature.  And books, again, of very moderate value, written by men of one-sided intellect or founded on somewhat shallow theories, may, by virtue of some special quality, or as embodying some potent idea, attain to a permanent place in the world of letters.  Many a great book ceases very early to command readers:  and many books continue to be read although they are far from great.

The first question that arises is this:—­Do the chief works of Carlyle belong to that class of books which attain an enduring and increasing power, or to that class which effect great things for one or two generations and then become practically obsolete?  It would not be safe to put his masterpieces in any exclusive sense into either of these categories; but we may infer that they will ultimately tend to the second class rather than the first.  Books which attain to an enduring and increasing power are such books as the Ethics, the Politics, and the Republic, the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius and of Vauvenargues, the Essays of Bacon and of Hume, Plutarch’s Lives and Gibbon’s Rome.  In these we have a mass of pregnant and ever-fertile thought in a form that is perennially luminous and inspiring.  It can hardly be said that even the masterpieces of Carlyle—­no! not the Revolution, Cromwell, or the Heroes—­reach this point of immortal wisdom clothed with consummate art.  The “personal equation” of Teufelsdroeckhian humour, its whimsies, and conundrums, its wild outbursts of hate and scorn, not a few false judgments, and perverse likes and dislikes—­all this is too common and too glaring in the Carlylean cycle, to permit its master to pass into the portals where dwell the wise, serene, just, and immortal spirits.  Not of such is the Kingdom of the literary Immortals.